The thread for movies that aren't going to get their own thread but are still in theaters

Vargen wrote:
BadKen wrote:

A Christian propaganda film that got 70% RT score (from ten reviewers) and 100% from 2500+ user ratings.

I don't understand what's so remarkable about that score. I'm not going to review a movie I haven't seen, and I can tell from the information available that I don't want to watch this one unless I'm being paid. Conservative Christianity is really good at both of isolating its members from mainstream society and being highly visible. Nobody is watching this thing by mistake.

2500+ people on the internet agreed on something? Super sus.

2500 people that were told at church to check it out and to be sure to review it by someone from the church who works in marketing at their day job and told everyone, "Look. I work in Mammon. This is how our fallen world operates and you too can use these tools to spread the Good Word!"

This isn't that different from other groups (pop music superfans, sports, etc) getting together to "support" their chosen thing despite its artistic merits.

If there's an ICP movie, I wouldn't be shocked if the same thing was happening. Heck, this same stuff happens for videos on YT. How could this possibly have so many likes?!

Alien Romulus : third best Alien movie.

Felt like one of the novels or comics. Would recommend in theaters.

we don't have a upcoming movies thread so I will lament this here.

Why? Didn't the shit show of drawing the Hobbit out make you realize everything shouldn't be multiple movies? Especially something that isn't even in the books?

The Hunt for Gollum Could Take Two Movies

Appearing as a guest on This Morning, Sir Ian McKellan confirmed The Hunt for Gollum will be split into “two films.”

I’m told it’s two films. I probably shouldn’t be saying that, but I haven’t read the script, and I don’t know when it is, and I don’t even know where it’ll be filmed.

Yeah Wicked going to 2 films has bothered people. Apparently the play is only 2:30. 245 with 15 min intermission.

There is a lot of content they could explore beyond the title. They could:

-Show Aragorn's development through flashbacks to his time in Gondor and Rohan, and meeting Arwen for the first time and his uneasy relationship with Elrond.
-Introduce the Dúnedain, Aragorn's fellow Númenórean rangers, and show them defending the Shire, Bree, and the rest of the Northlands, keeping the Hobbits blissfully unaware of the the threats just outside their borders.
-Show Shire politics, with Tooks and Brandybucks arguing about how many feathers should go in a shirriff's cap and whether those hicks way up in Needlehole really need Saturday post.
-Have a harrowing Hobbit crisis where the hops harvest fails endangering this year's beer supply.

Wake me up when the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales enter the public domain and they can start adapting any of the many, many awesome stories that Tolkien actually wrote that haven't made it to the screen yet.

Prequels suck. We know what Gollum's arc is. We know what Aragorn's arc is. Their stories have been told. Let me know when you have a story worth telling, not an IP that needs milking.

I see you have no future in private equity and/or on a major corporate board!

I want stories told in that world from the orcs' point of view.

Like, I want to learn about how orc society is organized, how power is distributed from Sauron down. An orc political thriller, basically.

Isn't there 2 video games for that?

Jonman wrote:

I want stories told in that world from the orcs' point of view.

Like, I want to learn about how orc society is organized, how power is distributed from Sauron down. An orc political thriller, basically.

My 100% unwritten and nonexistent novel is told from the POV of an orc in a Middle-earth-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off world who gets their mind back just as their Ring equivalent is destroyed. I saw him as a Guile Hero, trying to create a more stable community with other orcs, defending from more warlike orcs, and dealing with racism from other races. Murderbot but with orcs, basically.

I couldn't quite crack the hook beyond that though - if they're actually just ordinary people (but green and with tusks), it feels like I've lost the essential orc-ness of the premise? How is their society actually different? I couldn't sort it out in my own mind. I'm not drawn to the Warhammer football hooligan type orc at all. And Legends & Lattes already exists.

You could go the WOW route?

I don't think you can redeem Tolkein orcs and have them remain Tolkein orcs. They were made by evil to be evil, and will be evil even without a Dark Lord commanding them. Sauron's command of them wasn't any form of mind control either, it was just intimidation/respect through strength. There were eastern orcs that went a very long span of time being independent after Morgoth was defeated. When Sauron first tried to get them under his banner, they defied him for quite awhile before he finally brought them to heel.

The line between magic ("mind control") and more "mundane" forms of power and skill is always kinda fuzzy in Tolkien, however my understanding was always that there was a supernatural element to Morgoth and Sauron's control of their armies.

During the battle before the Black Gate at the end of Return of the King, when Sauron was destroyed by the destruction of the Ring, his army immediately lost its sense of purpose and fell into chaos in a way that the narrative compares to a hive of insects when the queen dies.

It's hard to imagine that happening so quickly and completely through purely mundane means. The armies of Gondor and Rohan were outnumbered by an order of magnitude or more. It would only take a couple of orc (or Easterling or Southron) captains deciding, "hey, power vacuum, let's kill these Gondorean scum and then duke it out to see who's the new Dark Lord" to make things really bad for Our Heroes, and yet ALL of them fled or surrendered.

It's true that some of Tolkien's writings mention Sauron being laughed at by Eastern orcs early in the Second Age, but that was before he forged the One Ring, which is described as bestowing a "power of Command," which is typically vague, but the capitalization does imply something supernatural.

All that said, it's certainly true that even when left to their own devices, Tolkien's orcs seem to universally revert to small-scale savagery. The fact that they seem biologically predisposed to evil and yet are consistently portrayed as thinking beings with some degree of free will always bothered Tolkien, and he never quite found a way to square that circle.

hbi2k wrote:

The line between magic ("mind control") and more "mundane" forms of power and skill is always kinda fuzzy in Tolkien, however my understanding was always that there was a supernatural element to Morgoth and Sauron's control of their armies.

During the battle before the Black Gate at the end of Return of the King, when Sauron was destroyed by the destruction of the Ring, his army immediately lost its sense of purpose and fell into chaos in a way that the narrative compares to a hive of insects when the queen dies.

It's hard to imagine that happening so quickly and completely through purely mundane means. The armies of Gondor and Rohan were outnumbered by an order of magnitude or more. It would only take a couple of orc (or Easterling or Southron) captains deciding, "hey, power vacuum, let's kill these Gondorean scum and then duke it out to see who's the new Dark Lord" to make things really bad for Our Heroes, and yet ALL of them fled or surrendered.

It's true that some of Tolkien's writings mention Sauron being laughed at by Eastern orcs early in the Second Age, but that was before he forged the One Ring, which is described as bestowing a "power of Command," which is typically vague, but the capitalization does imply something supernatural.

All that said, it's certainly true that even when left to their own devices, Tolkien's orcs seem to universally revert to small-scale savagery. The fact that they seem biologically predisposed to evil and yet are consistently portrayed as thinking beings with some degree of free will always bothered Tolkien, and he never quite found a way to square that circle.

I think Sauron's power over orcs would be best described as a passive morale boost. He's not forcibly making them do things, but he could focus his power on his armies to embolden them to face things that they would normally flee from.

It's worth noting that the book battle and the movie battle are quite different. In the book they don't all immediately flee. The terrain also meant that they couldnt't easily press their advantage of numbers, so a great many of the orcs that were surrounding the humans were already stuck patiently waiting for their turn to fight. Sauron's Command was basically keeping them from getting bored and fighting amongst themselves or leaving. "Kill the leader and the rest become demoralized" is already an effective tactic against orcs, and they all felt Sauron die after this much smaller force came waltzing up to his front gate and dared him into a fight. It was entirely reasonable for most of the orcs to think they were somehow responsible for it and to want nothing else but to get the hell away from whatever unknown power they had that could do that.

I was specifically making it separate from Tolkien so I could tweak details to make my story work - his orcs would not be good subjects as described.

I'm not sure Warcraft really helps me due to the specific angle I want to take with it: I want them to be quite different from the other races - not just culturally. I'm trying to capture that Murderbot thing of "distinctly not human, but still a person" thing that Martha Wells is so good at.

So I need actual biological differences and meaningful societal differences etc. beyond "big green angry tribal humans". The trouble I have is that when I try to do that (e.g. "they're like ants and have a Queen who does all the breeding") it feels too restrictive. I guess I'm aiming for the Motie thing of "trying to achieve a society that can work with others and be fair in spite of biology which makes that hard"

Hmm, Tolkein orcs reproduce through the normal method, but you could go further down the route Peter Jackson went with the Uruk-Hai and say they were made, not born. In Tolkein lore, Uruk-Hai were the product of humans forced to breed with orcs, but Jackson had Sauruman grow them with magic, though he doesn't elaborate on what went into the pods before they became Uruk-Hai. That would mean that survivors who got their minds back now faced extinction unless they found new sources of bodies with which to create new orcs. Your story could focus on trying to find a mutually beneficial arrangement with other races rather than just taking the bodies they need through conquest.

Stengah wrote:

Hmm, Tolkein orcs reproduce through the normal method, but you could go further down the route Peter Jackson went with the Uruk-Hai and say they were made, not born. In Tolkein lore, Uruk-Hai were the product of humans forced to breed with orcs, but Jackson had Sauruman grow them with magic, though he doesn't elaborate on what went into the pods before they became Uruk-Hai. That would mean that survivors who got their minds back now faced extinction unless they found new sources of bodies with which to create new orcs. Your story could focus on trying to find a mutually beneficial arrangement with other races rather than just taking the bodies they need through conquest.

Also Jackson's explanation is less icky.

One idea:

Through "magic", when Orcs reach a certain age, they get fed a potion that links them to a leader who gives them a certain amount of guidance. That leader gets guidance from a leader they are linked to and so-on up the chain. When the leader dies, the chaos is because it takes some time for the link to be re-activated to a new one. At low levels it is quicker because the troops know the new leader, so that link is easy to form. At higher levels, there needs to be a ceremony of sorts.

IMAGE(https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E03/XOaJltkqUpts2i6pADz0hhWUyjE=.gif)

Just caught Despicable Me 4 with a mini bbk. I laugh waaaay more at the Minions than a grown man should, mini loved it too.

I was pleasantly surprised by Beetlejuice 2 last week. It did a great job matching the tone of the first one with some new ideas and a lot of silliness. A few callbacks were a little extraneous, but overall pretty good. The wedding scene at the end was a-mazing, and I had the song stuck in my head for days.

Allow me to save you all 2 and a third hours.

Megalopolis is a cluster of bad ideas, poorly executed but beautifully shot, with nothing meaningful or interesting to say, despite a never-ending series of grandiose monologues and soliliqiues that imply a depth that is entirely illusory.

Characters, plotlines and ideas are discarded constantly, with no explanation. Metaphors are constantly hinted at, but never actually crystallize.

Huge events in the narrative are undone, forgotten within minutes and never referenced again.

The magical Macguffin can seemingly do anything, but is never used for anything interesting.

The main character is an architect but it's obvious that no architects were involved in the making of the movie.

The one highlight of the movie is Aubrey Plaza chewing the goddamn scenery to shreds.

Transformers One covers an origin story whilst taking down Donald Trump Prime. It was a lot better than I expected full marks for the depiction of Starscream by Steve Buscemi. So much better than the Bay abominations.

I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
Really good VA across the board.

fangblackbone wrote:

I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
Really good VA across the board.

Yes I didn’t even realise it was Hemsworth and Johansson till the credits.

bbk1980 wrote:

So much better than the Bay abominations.

So you're saying it is at least similar to a regular, normal movie, with plot and all those other regular, normal elements?

Feeank wrote:
bbk1980 wrote:

So much better than the Bay abominations.

So you're saying it is at least similar to a regular, normal movie, with plot and all those other regular, normal elements?

And 100% fewer weird leery shots in what is ostensibly a film about kids toys.